Unofficial Hack To Get Android 3.1 On Your Dell Streak 7

The Dell Streak 7 is one of the current crop of dual core NVIDIA Tegra 2-powered tablets on the market. The big difference is that it doesn’t come with the usual Honeycomb Android build. What it does come with is Android 2.2 and that is literally a whole version’s difference between that and Android 3.1. Plus, from what we hear, Dell isn’t exactly planning that anytime soon.

Well, thank God for hackers then. Hacker DJ_Steve figured out how to install custom ROMs in Honeycomb last month and recently he’s just figured out how to get Android 3.1 installed on your Streak 7. The bad news is it isn’t available to the public yet. This is mostly because he’s still ironing out some bugs – like not being able to wake up a tablet from sleep mode unless it’s plugged into an outlet.

The biggest hurdle to get Android 3.1 to the Streak 7 is the low native resolution. The Streak 7 has an 800 x 480 pixel display. That means your interface screen will not be as packed with information that you may want to.

However, after a bit of tinkering around, it seems that Honeycomb has a nifty little feature. If you lower the Android 3.1’s pixel density you end up seeing the old Android 2.3 Gingerbread interface. Now since the Streak 7 uses 2.2 naturally, that’s not much of a stretch in visual changes. What’s odd is that it’s the reverse in the Streak 7 if you’ve got 3.1 already installed. It seems you get the Gingerbread screen if you up the pixel density to 170ppi or higher. Which is pretty weird, since you’d expect it to be the other way around.